20 Years of the Salamander

time flies when a long life seems so short

It was 20 years ago to the day, that the blog “CDR Salamander” started with this little intro:

I never got my friend “CDR Bluebeard” to write, which is a shame. Everything else in that initial post, is as correct now as it was in Bush43’s first administration. Seems like yesterday.

For those who don’t remember 2004, this thing called “blogging” was so new, almost no one knew what it was. Most of us, like me, hung out on various bulletin boards, usenet groups, or sent out group emails. The more adventurous types had their own webpages, but there was also WordPress and what I chose, Blogger, that made it easy and much easier to remain anon.

As you can tell from the above post, you couldn’t even have hypertext early on; it was text only. Later, if you knew html, you could do more, and for years I did exactly that after they enabled html to make hypertext, bold, italics or even link to image hosting sites like Flickr.

On a regular basis, in addition to haunting the bulletin boards, usenet groups, and the “politics” or “current events” sections on various message boards, I started to see these “milblogs.”

In addition to the usual news sites, my yahoo RSS reader started with The Castle Argghhh!!!! or The Mudville Gazette, I realized that, hey, I can do this too. After a slow boil and one radicalizing event caused by CNO Clark, “CDR Salamander” came into being.

I don’t think I would have believed you if you told me I’d still be doing this two decades later. Heck, I only spent 21 years on active duty. Looking at this 2009 snapshot of the top-100 (I was just #39, the #2 Navy milblog behind Sean Dustman’s also shuttered Doc in the Box at #25), I think I’m the only one still going.

Huh.

At the beginning, the naval part of this space was small, and I was going to type out a big retrospective like I did on the 10th anniversary, but instead, 20 years later, I decided to try something different.

This Monday night at 8pm Eastern, I am going to host a Spaces on X, where our good friend Claude Berube is going to turn the microphone around on me and … interview me.

If you are not on X, go ahead and sign up if you’d like to listen. It’s free and I am sure Claude will pull out more details and items of interest than I’ll could do here.

As Claude outlined Sunday night, this will not be a scripted event. I have no idea what direction he will take the conversation, but he’s a pro at this.

I’m donning my naval historian cap tomorrow night to ask some questions.

20 years of writing a near-daily blog is a milestone.

In my first Letter of Marque, I have some principles I’ll use during the interview.

Nothing is off-topic.

UPDATE: if you missed the Spaces, we went a couple of hours and you can catch the recording at this link.

I’m going to try to get the audio to put up as a podcast for those who are not on X.